Like many other tech nerds, I am often called upon to seize control of some system remotely and rescue its user from some evil manifestation of technology. This isn’t my job (I don’t do this “commercially”), so my free tool of choice is TeamViewer. It’s free for non-commercial use, fast, and very easy to use even for people who don’t know very much about computers. But when I heard Google released something called Chrome Remote Desktop, my curiosity was piqued, so I decided to give it a try. This add-on is interesting because you set it up within Chrome, but you can use it to control the entire computer remotely, not just the Chrome session.

For a Chrome add-on, Remote Desktop is positively huge – it’s a 20MB download, so if you don’t have a fast connection, it might take a minute or two. Just for comparison, the latest version of TeamViewer weighs in at 4MB, so Chrome Remote Desktop is five times as big. Once you’re done downloading it, the add-on appears as a new button on your New Tab page. Clicking this button shows a somewhat-scary “extra permission” authorization page. Not a big deal for users who know what they’re doing, but if you’re guiding someone through the setup process over the phone, this might be a little stressful. You basically need to hit the Continue button:

… and then the allow access button:

And that’s it. Now you’re set up to remote control the computer, or use it to control other computers. When I guided a user through this setup process remotely, the trickiest part was actually getting them to see the Chrome Remote Desktop button on the New Tab page:

The user was looking for a button for an add-on (by the address bar), so I had to guide them to the New Tab page. Other than that, it was a fairly smooth setup process.

You can now either Share This Computer or access another computer:

When you click Share This Computer, you will get a single 12-digit PIN code, which you can copy and paste into a chat session or even dictate over the phone:

This is a nice simplification over TeamViewer, which uses a system of two codes (a user ID and a session password). With Chrome Remote Desktop, you have just a single number. To gain control over the computer, the other party needs to click the “access a shared computer” link on their Chrome Remote Desktop, and enter the PIN code:

Once you click Connect, the remote desktop instantly materializes, and if the connection is fast enough, it even keeps Windows’ Aero interface on, with drop shadows and transparency:

There’s a positively huge “Close Remote Desktop BETA” window that is always set on top, so that both you and the user sitting in front of the remote computer can terminate the session at any time. In fact, the window is so very large, that it sometimes gets in the way and needs to be moved around.

Is It Better Than TeamViewer?

In a word – no. Chrome Remote Desktop is a larger download, and provides less options than TeamViewer (for example, it doesn’t support file transfer). But it does have two very important advantages that might make you use it instead of TeamViewer. The first is that it is entirely free, not just for non-commercial use, but for all use. The second key advantage is that it is fully cross-platform – it works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Chromebooks. In fact, I believe it is currently one of the only ways to remotely control a Chromebook computer.

As a beta and a tech experiment, it is certainly impressive. I usually tend to see the browser as a sandbox of sorts – i.e, what happens in the browser stays in the browser. Chrome Remote Desktop definitely breaks that perception, and shows that Chrome can reach deep into your system if you only let it.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

iOS users, if you haven’t got your free 50GB from Box.net yet, hurry up and do so. A couple of weeks ago, Box.net announced that any iOS user that logs into the Box app from an iOS device will get 50GB of storage, for life. The promotion will only last 50 days, and about 14 of those have already passed, so not much time left for getting this hefty amount of free storage.

Box.net is a cloud content management platform, similar to Dropbox, which lets you store, access and share content online and across devices. The company does offer a free option, which usually includes only 5GB of storage, with a 25MB limit on file size upload.

Here is what you have to do to get a free 50GB with Box.net:

• Download the Box app for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and install it.
• Log into your Box account from the app, or register for a new one from within the app.

And that’s it. After logging in you should see a message informing you about your free 50GB. On top of the free storage, you will also get an increased file size limit for uploads: 100MB instead of 25MB.

Will you create a Box.net account just because of this promotion? Or do you prefer other solutions and will not be tempted by this?

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

The social networking wars have dialed it up to 11 this week, with Google unleashing its highly anticipated (and highly leaked) Google+ social initiative upon the world on Tuesday — to not a bad response, to be honest. So it’s not that surprising that today Facebook countered the + hubbub with its own ‘we’ve got something awesome’ unveiling planned for next week. You crazy kids!

The resemblance between the two social networks is uncanny — my Tweet-length opinion is that Google+ is like Facebook with a more usable, streamlined Photos and Groups interface (and that might be enough to win). Only time will tell.

In the meantime, for those of you who have the decidedly middle class problem of social network fatigue, there is a solution. Thanks to the unlimited creativity of  humans, you can now actually make your Google+ look like Facebook, with the Google+ : Facebook Stylish extension or this CSS code.

(Via TechCrunch.)

After long speculation, Google is officially introducing the company’s Facebook rival today, named Google+. It has a number of unique features to the service. Plus, there is no sign up required for anyone with an active Google account. But is this really the Facebook killer we have been waiting for?

Google+ has five different points of emphasis. The first is Circles, which lets you drag and drop friends into specific groups. Similar to Facebook friend lists, yes, but a lot of the sharing revolves around which groups the user decides to share certain bits of information to.

Building upon Circles is Hangouts, which is really just Google’s fancy term for group video chat. In the stream, users can see who is ‘hanging out’ and decide to join a hangout and participate in a large video conference. Hangouts may consist of random friends or specific Circles of friends.

Sparks is the third point of emphasis, and it stems more from Google search than it does from the social aspects of Google+. In a nutshell, it is a mini search engine. The service encourages the user to search for things of interest and save them in a list. Instead of a standard list of results, Sparks presents different articles or videos the user can watch, read, or share. And using the list of interests, the results for each are accessible again at any time.

Finally, we have two mobile features, available on the Android Market immediately and coming to the App Store soon. Instant Upload plays up the fact that it is a tedious process to upload multiple photos from a smart phone. This feature will automatically upload any photos and videos a user captures and store them in a private album in Google+ for sharing upon the user’s own discretion. Huddle, simply put, is Google’s answer to iMessage. It combines text messaging and chatting into one and allows for group chatting from within the app. Circles plays a big role in this as well.

Those five main features are the stars of the show here. Aside from them, Google+ does provide some more familiar features. A stream shows real-time updates from friends and a hub for sharing statuses, photos, videos, and links. Plus, each user gets an individual profile. The normal bar at the top of each Google product turns black when Google+ is active, and acts as full navigation for the services, profiles, and notifications.

The Google+ project is currently available by invitation-only, but over time Google will roll it out to everyone. So — the question you have been waiting for — is this going to take down Facebook? I think for sure that it has more potential than any other competitor thus far. However, since Facebook reportedly now has 750 million active users, winning the battle will be an extremely long and painful challenge. Google+ is either going to fly or die.

(Via Skatter Tech.)

A malware scam is making its way to a wide range of Mac users recently. It works by putting malicious links at the top of search results and tricks users into accidentally clicking them. After doing so, a fake virus scanner pops up on the screen. It then falsely informs the user of potentially harmful software on their computer and recommends downloading an even more dangerous application: MacDefender. The scam soon gets even worse when it prompts the user to provide credit card information before downloading the fake anti-virus removal tool.

On May 24th, Apple acknowledged the malware scam’s existence and posted a tip on how to remove the virus or just avoid it altogether. It states the following:

If any notifications about viruses or security software appear, quit Safari or any other browser that you are using. If a normal attempt at quitting the browser doesn’t work, then Force Quit the browser. In some cases, your browser may automatically download and launch the installer for this malicious software.  If this happens, cancel the installation process; do not enter your administrator password.

Apple has promised to deliver a software update for all Mac OS X users that will automatically find and remove Mac Defender, also known as Mac Protector or Mac Security, within a few days. It will also prevent users from accidentally stumbling onto it.

While these types of threats are relatively new for Mac users, Windows users have been experiencing scams and viruses of all sorts for years now. In fact, this exact type of scam — i.e. one that tricks users into downloading fake anti-virus software — is now almost infamous. Critics have said in the past that as the Mac becomes more and more mainstream, it will begin to face the same issues which have haunted Windows advocates for so long.

As of April 2011, Mac OS X had a worldwide market share of approximately 5.4% according to Net Applications. Windows remains strong at 88.91%, but has declined by about 2.5% in the last ten months while Mac usage continues to grow. At this rate, could Mac users see a rising amount of threats in the future? It is plausible, but still a concept that should be taken lightly.

Links: Apple Support
Mac Defender screenshot courtesy of Ubergizmo.

(Via Skatter Tech.)

Google has begun testing an integration of voice search with the Google.com search engine.

Helpful tipster Matt Schlicht first spotted the feature earlier Monday afternoon. Voice search detects your computer’s microphone settings and can open up a ‘Speak now’ widget to detect your words and transcribe them into a search query.

Android phone owners should be familiar with Google Voice Search; it’s available in the Google Search widget. Google Voice Search on Android even translates voice commands into actions. For example, ‘Directions to Empire State Building New York’ will get you instant driving directions to Manhattan’s famous landmark.

Google has been working hard on improving the accuracy of its voice search product. It now recognizes Chinese and learns from your speech patterns. Perhaps now Google believes it’s accurate enough to begin testing with the general populace.

Right now, voice search seems to be in a limited testing period. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

While searching by voice may be easier than typing in some cases, we don’t think you’re suddenly going to see an uptick in people shouting out their search queries. As our tipster pointed out on Twitter today, Google Voice Search ‘works surprisingly well but is very awkward to use in the office.’

What do you think of Google Voice Search? Should Google roll it out on its homepage?

Update: Google’s experiment is confirmed. ‘Google is constantly experimenting with new features,’ was the only thing a Google spokesperson would tell us officially, though.

The Google Voice Search Icon

Google.com users with access to the experiment might see this page the next time they visit Google.com

Google Voice Search Widget

Talking into the mic activates the Google Voice Search widget.

Google Voice Search Results

(Via Mashable!.)

Not every website can be a Google. No; not in terms of scale but in terms of the speed with which it loads up in our browsers. Minimalism is great, but it does not go with the need to put more content and animated ads on the webpage. It is sometimes a trade-off which every web designer has to make.

Creating faster webpages is one of the commandments of great web design. A slow loading speed not only indicates poor design but is also a huge turn-off for visitors. Slow loading webpages could also be symptoms of bugs or any other bottleneck.

The first step you can take to optimize your website is to put it through a speed test. These ten tools are few of the many which can help test loading speeds and give cues to create faster webpages.

WebWait

The timer gives you the average loading time of your website. Enter the URL of your site, set the number of runs, and get the results in terms of Average, Median, and Standard Deviation after the runs are through. You can set the number of test runs. While running the website speed test, the app factors in all images, stylesheets, and Javascript. It runs in all popular browsers. (See Directory mention)

Which Loads Faster?

Pit one site against the other and see which one comes out on top. You can benchmark the faster website and use it optimize the speed of your own website. The choice of two modes allows you to control the loading simultaneously in case one site interferes with the other. It could be quite a fun tool too as the ‘epic test’ between Apple and Adobe shows that Apple has bit of an edge. (See Directory mention)

Web Page Test

WebPagetest.org was developed by AOL and then Open Sourced. This web app gives you a long list of server locations to try out the tests on. Another dropdown enables you to set a specific browser (IE9 too). Advanced Settings are for further fine-tuning the test by setting parameters like the number of test runs, connection type, including scripts etc. You can also use a visual tool to compare multiple URLs together.  (See Directory mention)

Load.in

This website speed tool is definitely one of the coolest around in terms of visual appeal. Loads.in gives you more than 50 server locations around the world to try out loading speeds on. The first run retrieves the loading speed for a random location. The next ones can be set by country and browser type. As the test completes, you also get snapshots of the webpage at various points on a timeline. The loading time also displays the individual loading times of each site element in a waterfall chart. The data can also be downloaded as a HAR file. (See Directory mention)

Slowcop

This page loading speed tester gives you an instant speed report that also scores your site from 0 to 100. The report displays data like the total number of elements, page size, download time, and the score. With this as a denominator, you can instantly compare it against a competitor site and see the performance. (See Directory mention)

Ping Brigade

Test your website on three scales – ping, page load, and web server latency. The test is quite fast and a colored map gives you clickable server locations in America and the world to test with different servers. (See Directory mention)

Pingdom

Test your page load speeds The Full Page Test gives you a detailed visual report on the load time of each element (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). Objects included in javascript are ignored. You can sort through the results with the tools available on the menu bar and diagnose any bottlenecks if any.

BrowserMob

The free website performance test gives a neat visual display of loading times with reference to a few locations around the world. The number of objects on the page are also broken down in a nice colorful pie-chart. Use the waterfall chart to analyze each individual element in more detail.

WebSlug

WebSlug’s site timer gives you a comparative estimate of two websites. With just the URL you can benchmark one site against another. The simple site is pretty limited in scope but can be used as a ‘battle tool’ between two websites.

PageSpeed

Page Speed is an open-source project from Google that’s available as an online app and also as a Chrome extension. Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, and then generates suggestions to make that page faster. The suggestions are graded as low, medium, and high priority. Using this valuable tool you can see the suggestions on each object on the webpage. In an improvement, PageSpeed also tweaks the suggestions for faster mobile browsing.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

You can play music tracks through Dropbox’s web interface, but only one at a time, in a very minimalist player. DropTunes provides a great web front-end for your Dropbox-synced tunes, offering Flash or HTML5-based streaming and continual playback. It’s pretty darned handy.

More »

(Via Lifehacker.)

If you’re a digitally aware couch potato like me, you risk burning a significant number of calories surfing between Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and iTunes to get your fix of movies and television shows.

If you’re interested in mitigating that risk, you’ll want to take a look at Moki.tv, an all-in-one guide to the Internet’s entertainment offerings.

From Moki, you can browse a broad and deep catalog of almost all the silver-screen and small-screen content available on the web. You can watch free content from Hulu; subscription stuff from Hulu Plus, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Comcast’s xfinity tv; and on-demand TV and movies from iTunes and Amazon Video On Demand. You can sign up with Facebook Connect, then simply select the content services you already use; Moki makes it easy to connect service with third-party authentication, so you won’t need to remember any logins.

Once you’re in, you’ll be able to rate movies and get recommendations — you can even pull your rating from Netflix to Moki and vice versa — and create a queue of shows and movies to watch. The site uses your ratings as well as ratings from IMDb, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes to make recommendations for you; and the recommendations I got were spot-on, especially after I had imported my Netflix ratings.

Not only can you find and watch what you love without visiting a half-dozen websites; you can also find new shows and films to watch that are similar to ones you’ve already watched. You can sort content by genre, rating, popularity and release date; or you can browse award-winning films and TV shows. The site also has fascinating curated collections of content, like Shakespeare adaptations or Clint Eastwood flicks hand-picked by Eastwood himself.

In addition to getting boatloads of online video, you can explore trending lists of actors and directors, read synopses, write reviews, leave comments, and more. And perhaps best of all, if you signed up with Facebook Connect, you have an instant social connection and can see your friends’ ratings and reviews on content, too.

The site, though new, is remarkably full-featured; many of these cool features are made possible by clever integrations with existing sites and apps.

You can expect to see streaming media sources on Moki.tv soon. Currently, the site’s founders are polling users to find out which streaming sources are the most requested. Moki’s also working on an API.

We like the premise of the site — one-stop shopping for watching TV and movies online — and we like the UI, which is sleekly designed with lots of nice touches. Check it out for yourself, and let us know what you think.

Moki, Inc. is an San Francisco-based Y Combinator startup founded by Matt Huang, a recent MIT math grad, and another dev who is taking pains to keep his identity rather private. The company is currently hiring looking for local engineering talent.

(Via Mashable!.)

BBC recently released their iPlayer which allows you to watch many of the BBC shows on the web. Unfortunately for us, BBC does not allow users outside the UK to watch these shows. Luckily there’s a way around this. There are many sites recommending different software to use, but having tried many ways, this is the one I’ve found that works using Windows and Firefox: (note, you can also use instructions below to watch other content blocked from viewing within the US, or even to watch content only allowed in the US when you are abroad)

Step 1: Download and install the latest stable release of Tor using the default options. You can uncheck Privoxy in the install if you like. We will be using another proxy tool. (Tor is a tool that allows you to browse the web anonymously by routing your requests through various servers/proxies)

Step 2: We now need to ensure that the last server your request is routed through is a server in the UK. Go to https://torstat.xenobite.eu/. Click on the pulldown next to “CC:” and select “GB” and hit “search”. Now click on the “>” under “Exit”. You now have a list of servers in the UK that are allowed to be used as Exit Servers. Take note of all the nicknames of the servers except those marked Unnamed.

Step 3: Go to Start Menu and open All Programs -> Vidalia Bundle -> Tor -> torcc. This will open the Tor config file. Scroll all the way to the bottom and enter the following lines:
StrictExitNodes 1
exitnodes <list of the names you found in step 2 separated by commas>
An example of the second line above would be:
exitnodes anonion,anotherlink,colinwillsdorkyahoo
Save the file and exit notepad.

Step 4: Run Vidalia. After a few seconds, it should say “Connected to the Tor Network”.

Step 5: Install the Foxy Proxy addon for Firefox.

Step 6: When you install Foxy Proxy, it’ll ask you if you want to add a Tor proxy to it’s settings. You’ll want to set up the Tor Proxy to have the following 2 patterns: BBC iPlayer pattern – http://*bbc.co.uk/* and Tor Check pattern – http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/*

Step 7: Check that you’re exiting through a UK server by going to http://torcheck.xenobite.eu/index.php

There you go – now, when you have Vidalia and Foxy Proxy running, whenever you go to the iPlayer site, you’ll be able to watch videos. Note, that you’ll probably have to repeat step 2 and step 3 intermittently, as the same UK servers don’t always exist.